Final reminder: David Papineau is giving our keynote address today at 11 AM in the Dugald Stewart Building 3.10. Catered lunch at 12:30 on the 7th floor of DSB. Glen Pettigrove is giving our final talk at 1:30 in 3.10 DSB.

The SPA AGM and Conference is coming up next week on Thursday/Friday 7 and 8 December in Edinburgh. The conference program is below (with a few minor updates). If you would like to attend the conference dinner (likely cost: £15 – £20), please email me at scotsphil@gmail.com by Tuesday 5 December. The dinner location will be Namaste Kathmandu (17 Forrest Rd). If you would simply like to attend the conference, it would be great if you could let me know, but don’t feel pressure, and do feel free to simply turn up on the day. Note: all Scottish PG students welcome!

I’m happy to announce more details on the upcoming SPA AGM in Edinburgh on Thursday/Friday 7 and 8 December. David Papineau (KCL) is our keynote, and Michela Massimi (Edinburgh) and Glen Pettigrove (Glasgow) are also speaking. Titles to be given in an update.

There is no registration fee, but please email me at scotsphil@gmail.com to register for the conference. Please indicate whether you would like to attend the dinner (likely cost: £15 – £20).

The Hermeneutics of Practice is an Art and Philosophy symposium hosted by the School of Humanities. The themes it will investigate will be in honour of Professor Nicholas Davey, who retired from the University of Dundee in 2017. The speakers we have invited, including guest speakers from the University of Westminster and Lancaster University, have previously worked with Nicholas Davey, and are leading experts on contemporary creative practices. Topics to be explored include: what is an artistic practice? How do philosophy and art intertwine when considering notions of practice? How might the notion of hermeneutics aid us when it comes to understanding (artistic) practice?

Tea and coffee will be served in the afternoon, and attendance is free. Please note the change of rooms in the morning and afternoon sessions.

The Scottish Aesthetics Forum is delighted to announce its next lecture:

Dr Angela Breitenbach (Cambridge)

“Aesthetic reflection and scientific understanding”

Thursday, 2 November, 2017, 4:15 – 6:00pm

Room 7.01, Dugald Stewart Building,

University of Edinburgh

The lecture is free and open to all!

Abstract: “Scientists routinely speak of the aesthetic merit of theories, proofs and explanations, often regarding the experience of beauty and elegance in science as a motivation for their work and an indication of its truth. But aesthetic judgments in science are as controversial as they are widespread. On one side, aestheticians have worried that statements about the beauty of a theory or the elegance of a proof are merely metaphorical and lack genuine aesthetic status. On the other side, philosophers of science have wondered why aesthetic concerns should play any role in the search for scientific knowledge. I address this two-fold challenge by asking how judgments of beauty could be both aesthetic and relevant for scientific enquiry. I propose an answer inspired by the Kantian idea that aesthetic experience is grounded, at least in part, in the subject’s spontaneous intellectual activities. I argue that relevant aesthetic judgments are grounded in the subject’s awareness of her creative intellectual activities in devising and grasping a theory. And I suggest that judgments of this kind may offer a heuristic tool for scientific enquiry by indicating achievements of understanding.”

About the speaker: Angela Breitenbach is a Lecturer in philosophy at King’s College at the University of Cambridge. Her work includes Kantian conceptions of aesthetics and beauty in science and mathematics, the relationship between laws and unity, causality and causal knowledge, as well as Kantian perspectives on biology and nature, among other things. Along with being a Fellow at King’s College, she’s also a ProFutura Fellow at CRASSH and a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. She’s recently done a TEDx Talk called “Can theories be beautiful?” which is available on YouTube.

Additional information: The lecture will be followed by a dinner with our speaker. If you would like to attend the dinner, please contact the organisers by 26 October.

*** There are limited funds to cover dinner expenses for two students, offered on a first-come-first-served basis. ***

Reminder: the SPA Annual General Meeting is held in early December every year, rotating between the SPA member departments. This year the SPA will be hosted by Edinburgh on Thursday/Friday December 7 and 8. I’ll be posting a full schedule soon; in the meantime please mark your calendars.

On Monday 23rd October there will be a symposium on themes from Rowan Cruft’s forthcoming Human Rights, Ownership, and the Individual (OUP). There is a growing literature on the philosophy of human rights that rarely engages with earlier work on the nature of rights, or on property’s canonical place in the history of rights theory. This symposium brings together legal, moral, and political philosophers to consider these issues in relation to Rowan Cruft’s forthcoming book. For more information, see http://joseph-bowen.weebly.com/symposium-on-human-rights-ownership-and-the-individual.html

“Law and the Whole Truth” Workshop: University of Glasgow, August 10-11, 2017. This interdisciplinary legal workshop presents and examines different perspectives relevant to the relationship between law and the “whole truth”. The workshop, introduced by Prof. Burkhard Schafer (University of Edinburgh), is divided into four sessions: 1) Information disclosure and the whole truth, 2) Defamation, perjury and the whole truth, 3) Law, neuroscience and the whole truth, and 4) Philosophical perspectives on law and the whole truth. Click here to learn more.

This workshop will be of interest to solicitors working in a range of legal areas such as media law, medical negligence and criminal law. Certificates of attendance, for the purposes of CPD certification, will be available on request.

The workshop will take place during the full days 6 and 7 September, with the training session for ESR’s scheduled for Friday 8 in the morning.

The workshop will finish on the 7 with a panel session with Tim Williamson, Crispin Wright and Adrian Haddock (Stirling) on how different conceptions of the aim of philosophy and epistemological theorizing explain lack of convergence. This session is aimed to focus on the unifying aim of Diaphora.

The Adam Smith Lecture in Jurisprudence

The Adam Smith Lecture in Jurisprudence seeks to make productive in a contemporary context the distinctive approach of the Scottish Enlightenment to legal philosophy. The Lecture invites some of the world’s most distinguished legal and political philosophers whose ideas have reached out beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries, to shape innovative thinking on key philosophical, political and social aspects of law and government. It is envisaged that these lectures will form landmark moments in our understanding of contemporary debates on law and its place in an interconnected world.

2017 Lecture

T?he 2017 Adam Smith Lecture in Jurisprudence will take place on Friday 26 May. The invited speaker is A J Julius (UCLA) who will be presenting on ‘Free production through and against property’.

The event will take place at 5:30pm, Humanities Lecture Hall, Main Building. A drinks reception will follow the lecture.

Free Entry – All welcome

Abstract

This lecture will arrange for Locke, Rousseau, Smith, Kant, and Fichte to agree about property by arranging for them to agree with Karl Marx. The project of using what’s mine to make what’s mine is an attempt at producing freely. It fails: the general interdependence of individual production activity as it’s organized by private property is a mutual subjection. The attempt will succeed only when propertyless workers free themselves to work together on purpose.

More information: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/adam-smith-lecture-in-jurisprudence-tickets-34573781110?aff=es2

It is our pleasure to invite you to the 10th edition of the St Andrews Kant Reading Party. The event will take place between the 24th and the 27th of July 2017, at the Burn House in Edzell (http://theburn.goodenough.ac.uk/). The title of this year’s edition is ‘Kant and Sidgwick’, and the main goal will be to investigate the philosophical relations between Kant’s ethics and the utilitarian philosophy of Henry Sidgwick, with a special focus on the nature of morality and the good.

It is commonly argued that Kantian ethics and Utilitarianism (whose most rigorous formulation is arguably to be found in the work of Henry Sidgwick) are incompatible and even opposed to each other. However, it has also been argued that the two views are actually quite similar, both in form and in upshot, and some philosophers have gone as far as to claim (i) that they are largely compatible and/or (ii) that by combining the two an even stronger ethical system could be developed. The debate over the relation between Kantian ethics and utilitarian philosophy is still alive and well, waiting for new insights and new creative contributions.

This year there will be up to six discussion sessions (all texts will be made available), as well as up to four paper sessions (see CFA below).

Participation Fees:

Staff members: £150; Students: £75

The fee covers accommodation and full board at the Burn House, as well as transportation from St Andrews to the Burn House and back.

If you would like to attend but child care duties make it difficult, please get in contact with Lucas Sierra Vélez (lsv2@st-andrews.ac.uk). We will do our best to meet your requests, and we hope to be able to provide financial support.

Registration:

Since the number of places is limited, the registration process is divided in two steps: 1) Informal registration: send an e-mail including name, affiliation, and a brief expression of interest to Lucas Sierra Vélez (lsv2@st-andrews.ac.uk) by the 26th of May. 2) Payment: selected participants will be given instructions on how to make the online fee payment.

Call for abstracts:

Postgraduate students are invited to send anonymised abstracts of no longer than 750 words, as well as a separate cover sheet including name, position, institutional affiliation, and e-mail address to Kristina Kersa (kk203@st-andrews.ac.uk) by the 26th of May. Abstracts will be selected by blind review, and applicants will be notified by the 9th of June.

Papers should be suitable for a presentation of 40 minutes, and should attempt to clarify the relations between Kant’s ethics and Sidgwick’s Utilitarianism, or at least between Kantian ethics and Utilitarianism more generally. Preference will be given to papers addressing topics from the following list:

The nature of action, practical reason and morality; The nature of human agency and human motivation; The relation between maxims/motives/intentions and consequences; The Kantian idea of ‘practical love’ and its relation to utilitarian benevolence; The moral standing of non-human animals; The axiological, practical and moral significance of happiness; The nature of happiness; The meaning and varieties of ‘hedonism’; The Kantian highest good and its relation to the idea of a maximally happy world; The idea of ‘deserving happiness’; The dualism of practical reason (morality vs egoism); The question of the ultimate/supreme good; The meaning of the term ‘good’ and the varieties of goodness; The notions of intrinsic value and unconditional value; The concepts of ‘dignity’ and ‘respect’; The distinction between ‘harming someone’ and ‘wronging someone’; Ideal theory vs non-ideal theory; Self-regarding and other-regarding duties.

For any questions, please do not hesitate to contact Lucas Sierra Vélez (lsv2@st-andrews.ac.uk).

The Kant Reading Party is made possible by the support of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, the Centre for Academic, Professional and Organisational Development of the University of St Andrews, the St Andrews Philosophy Department, the International Society for Utilitarian Studies, the Mind Association, and the Scots Philosophical Association.

The Scottish Aesthetics Forum is delighted to announce its next lecture:

Dr Cain Todd (Lancaster)

“Transparency, Imagination, and Time in
Aesthetic Experience”

Thursday, 27 April, 2017, 4:15 – 6:00pm

Room 1.20, Dugald Stewart Building,

University of Edinburgh

The lecture is free and open to all!

Abstract: The main aim of this paper is to explore some connections between imagination and time in aesthetic experiences, where such experiences are not confined solely to an engagement with works of art. In the process, I will examine how aesthetic experiences differ significantly from perceptual experiences in respect of their transparency, their employment of attention, and their effects on temporal representation. This will lead to a discussion of some implications for how we should characterise aesthetic experiences in general, as well as how to understand the normative dimension of the judgements that are held to express them.

About the speaker: Cain Todd is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Lancaster. His main research interests span predominantly issues in aesthetics that intersect with concerns in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and ethics. Currently, he focuses on the nature of emotion and imagination with a view to outlining their roles in value judgement. As part of this project he also works on buck-passing accounts of value, evaluative disagreement and relativism, the phenomenology of evaluative experience, meta-cognition, and the nature of epistemic emotions. He is the author of the monograph The Philosophy of Wine: A Case of Truth, Beauty, and Intoxication (London: Acumen 2010).

Additional information: The lecture will be followed by a dinner with our speaker. If you would like to attend the dinner, please contact the organisers by Monday, 24 April.

*** There are limited funds to cover dinner expenses for two students, offered on a first-come-first-served basis. ***

Attending the Conference

As seats are limited, we require all potential attendees to send us an expression of interest in attending (at standrewsethicsofgiving@gmail.com) by 14 April 2017. We will then confirm no later than 21 April 2017 whether you have a reserved seat at the conference. We regret that we have no remaining funding for travel assistance. Moreover, a reserved seat at the conference does not on its own guarantee a reserved seat at the Singer lecture, which is a ticketed event.

Organiser

Acknowledgements

For generous funding and support, we are grateful to the Mind Association, the Society for Applied Philosophy, the Scots Philosophical Association, the JN Wright Trust, the Giving What We Can chapter at the University of St Andrews, the Department of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, and the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy and Public Affairs at the University of St Andrews.